There seemed little doubt Noel had played his last minute for the Wildcats this season the moment he landed, wrongly, on the O'Connell Center court. There was only the slight hope his rehabilitation time frame would be measured in weeks, not months.

He was not so fortunate. As with all ACL injuries at this point in the college basketball season, his projected recovery time will carry him well into next season. We have seen too many athletes return from this surgery, though, and retrieve their former greatness to expect anything other than Noel again flying high above the rim to terrorize opposing shooters.

"I met with Nerlens earlier today. The meeting was really positive, and I loved his attitude," UK coach John Calipari said in a statement Wednesday afternoon. "The way he is already dealing with this injury lets me know that he is going to come back stronger than ever."

The Kentucky Wildcats will continue without him. That's how it works in athletics. Nobody calls off a season because a star player is injured or absent. The Baltimore Ravens played long stretches without Terrell Suggs and Ray Lewis. They are your Super Bowl champions. The San Francisco Giants lost Melky Cabrera not to an injury but to insolence. They are your World Series champions.

Those are the happy stories about what can be accomplished through adversity. The Chicago Bulls, on the other hand, have played 15 fewer games to date than in last year's lockout-shortened season and already have lost five more. They are not the same team without All-Star point guard Derrick Rose, who is rehabbing from a torn ACL last spring.

That reality is more germane to this circumstance, because basketball is a drastically different sport. In this game, "next man up" might sound courageous, but most often it's an empty declaration. Can the Wildcats become an NCAA Tournament team in the absence of their best player? Because they weren't yet one with him, and now he is gone.

Noel mathematically represented 15.9 percent of Kentucky's team in terms of minutes played. He was responsible for 13.9 percent of the Wildcats' points, 24.3 percent of the rebounds and, indeed, 59.2 percent of their blocked shots.

If ever there were a moment when it stood clear how limiting a devotion to statistical analysis can be in this game, it is capture in that sequence of numbers. None of them approximates how valuable Noel has been to the Wildcats.

On a team with at least one supremely gifted forward who often struggles to play with sufficient energy, Alex Poythress, Noel has performed from the first day of practice with the admirable passion that ultimately led to his injury: attempting to run down a likely layup that was simply going to add two points to a pending Florida blowout.

On a team with at least one capable guard who often struggles to play with sufficient confidence, Archie Goodwin, Noel performed from the first game of his college career as though he had every intention of making a tremendous difference for the Wildcats. He struggled in some ways with the physicality presented by Maryland 7-footer Alex Len in his college debut, but Noel blocked three shots and grabbed nine rebounds. Matched against Duke's terrific Mason Plumlee in his second game, Noel delivered 16 points, eight rebounds, four steals and three blocks. That's a guy who believes.

Without him, Kentucky still has multiple future NBA players and a Hall of Fame-caliber coach. But a team that even with Noel was struggling for a precise identity now must invent an entirely new one. The Wildcats are lacking a significant history of achievement — merely 1-4 against the RPI top 50 — and would have to immediately reestablish a powerful sense of momentum to convince the NCAA Selection Committee they are worthy of a tournament bid.

They had won eight of their past 10 games with Noel as the most important component in that streak. They were capable of winning each of the next seven, the last of those serving as the most essential because No. 7 Florida on the Rupp Arena court represents an excellent opportunity for a quality win.

What the Wildcats are capable of accomplishing now is impossible to discern because it's not entirely certain how they will attempt to accomplish it. Do they become a zone team? Do they change how they defend pick-and-rolls? Do they have to change their offense because Noel isn't around to supercharge the defense?